Anything Helps?

It was a hot, sunny day and I was sitting at a red light near the interstate exit ramp when a man walked out of the weeds with a cardboard sign. It read, “Out of Work. Hungry. Anything Helps.”

In an age of debit cards and online bill-pay, I don’t actually carry any cash that I could give him. He wasn’t the first I had seen at that interstate exit, and he certainly won’t be the last. There is always someone in battered clothes with a dirty beard and a cardboard sign in that area as long as the weather is warm enough.

It is always a wrench to pass them by. I want to do something. But I can’t.

Because I don’t think that the words on the sign are true. Anything helps? No, not really. Because things aren’t the answer. A few dollars or an offering of canned or boxed food will help fill an empty stomach for a day, but the problem will remain tomorrow and the next day. In fact, giving out food and money only enhances the true problem; that a man has no home and no means of working to earn his food.

Why are we so content to tackle the surface symptoms of a problem, but refuse to make real progress on the cause? We can give away as much food as we want, but the hungry will only come back and ask for more tomorrow. The problem of poverty is not that the poor lack things. These days, there is usually someone willing to give enough to keep them from starving. The true problem is that they lack the ability to sustain themselves. No work, no resources, and no hope.

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert is an excellent book that speaks to the heart of this problem. It talks about all the things that we do to try to help the poor, and how these things actually make the problem worse.

I can’t help anyone by tossing a few dollars out of my car window. Not really. We can only help the poor by building a relationship with them. We can only alleviate poverty by providing access to jobs and resources, and helping to change attitudes of dependence. We live in a broken system, and that system is only made worse by simply giving, giving, giving things. Anything doesn‘t help at all. Things only make the problem worse.

When I look at the Bible, I see that Jesus never once gave a poor person anything. He didn’t hand out money, didn’t pass out free dinner except when the crowd had come out to hear him--people who could earn their own dinner on a normal day. When Jesus met a poor person, he only ever gave one thing. Healing. Peter does the same thing in Acts. A beggar asks for money, and Peter heals his legs.

Of course, in that day and age, beggars were usually cripples some how. That is why they were begging; they couldn’t work. Jesus healed them and gave them the means to begin to earn their own living. He didn’t feed them, he empowered them. It is no different today. In some way, everyone who is begging, who needs money or food, needs healing. Something in their life and in their heart is malfunctioning. They do not need a few dollars tossed out a car window. They need a relationship that can heal their soul and incentive and opportunity to get out and work for their own living. In a day and age of reasonable accommodations, very few people are truly too disabled to do some sort of meaningful work.

So do you hand out a few dollars to the beggar on the street, or let them starve? I’m not sure. But I know there is such a thing as a professional beggar, one who has rags he puts on ever day as he goes to work on the curb, and takes off when he comes home to a nice house, three-car garage. True story. This guy begs for his living, and it is a good one. Yes, I know most beggars aren’t like that. Most homeless have more of a psychological problem then a physical one, a brokenness of spirit that doesn’t allow them to stay in one place, at one job, in one home for long. But do we feed the problem, or reach out the hand of friendship?

So if I do have change to give to a beggar so he can get through the next day with a full belly, I don’t kid myself. I’m not helping him in the long run. Not at all.